On Thu, 27 Jun 1996 13:21:15 GMT "Daniel A. Norton" <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>Nothing  other  than  your  message  and  its  tone  could  have  better
>reinforced my opinion about your attitude towards customers.
 
Thank you. This list gives you direct access to the senior developers who
make design decisions and determine whether your requests are implemented
or not, and  when. This has been done  for a lot of reasons  that I don't
have the time  to type and that  I am sure everyone can  imagine, but the
bottom line is that this is not  a formal L-Soft contact channel, this is
not the  place to  make formal  requests for  new features  with business
justifications, and this is not the place where you will receive the kind
of formal, friendly,  business-oriented responses that as  a customer you
are entitled to receive from L-Soft. As one of our valuable customers you
are more than  welcome to do all these things  through the proper method,
which is  an e-mail message to  [log in to unmask] or a phone  call to (301)
731-0440. Requests submitted through this list  may or may not receive an
informal response from someone in development who may or may not have the
time to  be nice  to you or  write a calm,  polite reply  to inflammatory
comments. As  a rule,  when developers  don't have the  time to  do these
things, they take note  of the request, put it on the to  do list, but do
not reply.  Their job is  to improve the product,  NOT to reply  to angry
customers. If the lack of reply is a problem, I'm sure we can arrange for
a sales person to subscribe and post nice replies as the need arises.
 
Anyway the  current mechanism has worked  fine since 1986, but  I realize
the Internet is growing and the world is changing. Maybe what we will end
up having  to do is start  operating like every other  company and simply
have a clerical person read the  various support lists, compile a monthly
list of requirements  from the messages and submit it  to the sales team.
This  way no  customer  will be  angered  at  the tone  of  a reply  from
development - everything  will be done through the sales  unit. To put it
bluntly, the  time I spent  typing this and the  other message is  time I
didn't spend implementing the feature you requested or, more importantly,
the other feature  we had to push  aside in order to make  time for yours
and that may no  longer be in 1.8c. It simply isn't  productive for me to
reply to certain messages and this  is why I often refrain from replying.
To take  the example of  the subject feature,  this is a  rather delicate
development that  will postpone the coding  of AFD/FUI, which is  sure to
upset a lot of customers who will now write to attempt to sway things the
other way, because due to  different environments they couldn't care less
about your feature. The hard business  reality however is that some LARGE
customers are now threatening (through proper, formal channels) to switch
to  Majordomo because  of the  subject  feature, whereas  nobody is  even
thinking of switching to Majordomo due to the lack of AFD/FUI, so AFD/FUI
will have  to wait.  I felt that  it was  not a good  idea to  start this
discussion, and this  is why I refrained from commenting.  Now I will let
you enjoy the flame war and I have used up my public list quota for today
so don't expect any further feedback from me.
 
  Eric